My mother refuses to celebrate Indian Independence Day. Growing up in Kolkata, every year on August 15 I’d watch the streets fill with revellers, their faces painted the tricolour of the Indian flag. At schools, offices and government buildings around the country, flags would be hoisted and children would bellow our national anthem with puffed chests. Football matches and festivals would be organised, dance routines choreographed and, amidst all the noise, my mother would ask, “What exactly are they cheering for?”

The euphoria of freedom in 1947 came hand in hand with the horrors of partition. The largest mass migration in human history led to the death of over a million people and fractured the subcontinent into three nations that continue to fight an endless civil war. This short-lived victory is one my mother would rather forget. “I wish we could just move on,” she says.

But so many people, it seems, can’t move on. The 70th anniversary of Indian independence has sparked a resurgence of interest in India, Britain and our shared, entangled histories. The excellent BBC documentary My Family, Partition and Me, which traces the lives of four British Asian families during independence, was a catalyst. Suddenly everyone wanted to know more about the night that changed everything.

After the initial rupture, partition became a slow and painful continental drift

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My grandmother Bharati remembers it well. An announcement on the radio said that at the stroke of midnight India would become an independent nation. The family raised a flag on the roof of their Kolkata home and listened as the night air filled with the sound of sirens and beating drums. On the street outside, a jeep pulled up carrying British soldiers. Locals handed them sweets and asked them to join in the chants of “Long live India!” They did so gladly, relieved to be heading home themselves.

A year before independence, Kolkata was a different place entirely. Riots had engulfed the city, bodies lay scattered on pavements and the religious unity that won India its freedom was slowly fraying. By June 1947, the British had decided on partition. Cyril Radcliffe, a London lawyer who had never been to India, was tasked with dividing the country. The stroke of his pen bisected cities, families, and even homes. For several days, Lahore did not know which side of the pen it had fallen on.

One such village sliced open by the Radcliffe line was Baghakhali, home to my great great grandmother Kanon Bala. Her house fell right on the borderline, but it was in India by a hair’s breadth. She was luckier than her neighbour – he complained that his living room was in India but his kitchen in the newly formed East Pakistan.

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“She loved that house,” my grandmother recalled. “Even through all the bloodshed she wouldn’t leave.” As the violence escalated and people fled, Kanon Bala wanted to wait out the storm. When her family finally persuaded her to move west to the town of Krishnanagar, she came back home as often as she could and brought everyone with her. Even my mother remembers visiting the village as a child. “We waded through a river, crossed a field and suddenly we were in Bangladesh. There weren’t proper borders yet, and if there were border guards Kanon Bala would bring them homemade pastries and they wouldn’t say a word.”

After the initial rupture, partition became a slow and painful continental drift. Violence escalated in East Pakistan over the next two decades until it sparked the liberation war of 1971, after which the country was renamed Bangladesh. By then, it was no longer safe to travel to Baghakhali.

I won’t get to visit Kanon Bala’s village. About 30 years ago her house was sold and demolished – and even so, the borders have now grown too tall for us to slip through so easily.

My grandparents married in 1957. In faded family photographs, they are fresh-faced and immaculately dressed, fitting symbols of the new, modern India they were promised after independence. What followed was not quite what they had expected.

The borders have now grown too tall for us to slip through so easily

Much has been said about independent India, 70 years on. Now the world’s largest secular democracy, India’s economy is growing faster than China’s and it wields more global influence than ever before. Despite this, the divisions sown during partition continue to fester. The criminal justice system is in limbo, corruption is rife and a Hindu nationalist agenda has taken hold in politics.

After all the nation has suffered and continues to suffer, is this day still cause for celebration? “No, not yet,” my grandmother sighed heavily. “But independence means we could now build something great, maybe something even worth celebrating.”

The same doubts haunted the independence movement. Could this vast, unruly nation govern itself after almost two centuries of British rule? Gandhi’s answer to the British was simple. “Leave India to God,” he said. “And if that be too much, leave her to anarchy.”

This year we mourn the country we lost in 1947, but we also take solace in the fact that however flawed and fragile these new nations – India, Pakistan and Bangladesh – might be, they at least belong to their citizens. They are countries whose futures they can forge themselves.